Two startups emerged from stealth with strategies to improve the success rate of Big Data projects and completely redesign the way enterprises store and analyze large amounts of different kinds of data, taking advantage of cloud computing capabilities.

Some major investors this week infused Cloudera with $160 million in funding, much of which the company said will be used to invest in engineering resources to extend its Apache Hadoop community contributions.

To generate interest in its enterprise-class Watson supercomputer platform now being offered as a service, IBM is encouraging mobile app developers to harness its "cognitive computing" power in a developer challenge contest.

Although relational databases will continue to be used for high-speed online transaction processing, conventional relational databases have clearly exhausted their usefulness for business analytics. What’s ahead for database technology?